My Ass and Yours

Bizarro is brought to you today by Budget Colonoscopy.

Now that I'm 50, I'm supposed to periodically pay a stranger to probe my rectum with a garden hose. I'm referring to what the strangers in this business call a "colonoscopy," of course. Yes, it can save your life, but yes, it can also give you nightmares for years. Plus, it is expensive.

It would be hard enough to force myself to make this appointment and do all the revolting things necessary to achieve the "end" result, if it were free. (Like eating nothing the day before, drinking sludge to make you poop like a rabid camel for 24 hours, jet propulsion-strength farting and pooping after the garden hose is removed, etc.) But on top of the insult and injury involved, they also insist you pay them large quantities of money.

Since I'm self employed, I have no discount health insurance plan through work, so I'm forced to pay these things out of my own pocket at insurance-company prices, or pay the equivalent of a luxury car payment to an insurance company every month just in case I one day need it. It's legalized extortion.

I'm rooting for Obama's universal health care thingy, but I'm not holding my breath over it. That activity is reserved for hoping I don't have butt cancer. Lifelong vegans virtually never get colon cancer, but I've only been eating that way since 2002. Apparently all the carcasses I consumed for the previous 40+ years can have a residual effect and literally come back to bite me on the ass.

Since this was a fairly dark posting, here is a funny picture to pick you up.

Lip Brush With Fame

On occasion I get mistaken for Elvis Costello by people who don't really know what Elvis Costello looks like. They see glasses and a hat and figure I must be him. But now it will be an even more frequent nuisance, because Elvis is sporting a mustache. Damn that look-stealing limey. What next? A cigar?













He has even fashioned his hairline to look like mine, as evidenced in this photo of him doffing his hat at the end of Conan O'Brien's show last night.















For anyone interested in how to accurately tell the difference between myself and Costello in the wild, I offer this brief list of defining characteristics:

1. His hair is longer and wavy, mine is very short
2. The brims of his hats are larger than mine
3. His clothing is expensive, mine is mostly from resale shops and smells of cigars
4. He has Diana Krawl on his arm, I have CHNW (personally, I think I come out ahead on this one)
5. I am the one occasionally mistaken for Elvis Costello, he is the one never mistaken for me.

How Publishers Discourage You From Buying Single Issues of Their Comics

Exhibit #1: Boom! Studio's Irredeemable: Volume 1 collects issues #1-4 of the series.
* Cost to buy the individual issues (at $3.99 each): $15.96.
* Cost to buy the collection: $9.95
* Your penalty for buying the individual issues: $6.01

Exhibit #2: DC/Vertigo's Madame Xanadu Vol. 1: Disenchanted collects issues #1-10 of the series.
* Cost to buy the individual issues (at $2.99 each): $29.90
* Cost to buy the collection: $12.99
* Your penalty for buying the individual issues: $16.91
(plus there are no ads in the collection!)

When readers know there's going to be a cheaper collection soon after the issues in it are published, why should they shell out the $$$$ for the individual issues?

Father's Day

(How big can you make this cartoon? Click the Wolverine's beer label and find out!)

Bizarro on this day is brang to youse by Power Urination.

Regular readers of this blog will recall that I posted this cartoon a few weeks ago beneath a link, but did not include the caption. (I'd link to that now, but I can't find it.) Anyway, I mentioned in that previous post that I thought it was regrettable that this cartoon would run on Father's Day, when it is about men who are estranged from their families. It was completely unintentional.

My Sunday cartoons are drawn about six weeks ahead, so sometime in mid-March I drew the cartoon, inked it, colored it, got it all ready to submit to King Features, then looked on my calendar to see what date was next. Turned out it was Father's Day but by that time it was too late to replace it with something less pointed.

So I'd like to apologize to any estranged fathers out there who found this cartoon to be painful. I got divorced in the mid-nineties when my daughters were 9 and 14, so I know it can be tough. On the bright side, it probably isn't a tough as being a huge, blue furry guy with a face like a baboon's ass. So count your blessings.

As for my own Father's Day, 2009 – My two daughters called and said, "HFD," I called my dad and said, "HFD," he said it back, then I went to work in my garden. For once, it only rained HALF the day, so it was a rousing success by recent standards and I enjoyed it thoroughly. No decorations, no gifts, no songs written for the occasion, no TV specials, no obligatory parties...my kind of holiday!

Monkey Covers

Sunday is Monkey Covers day here at YACB. Because there's nothing better than a comic with a monkey on the cover!

Monkey reaches the mountain peak way ahead of Bear on Howie Post's cover for The Monkey and the Bear #3 (1954).

(Standard disclaimer about how monkeys shouldn't smoke cigars applies.)


Image courtesy of the GCD. Click on the image for a larger version.

Pedestrians of Note

(For the making of a larger cartoon with the easier reading, click the third toe of the fourth foot from the left.)

Today's Bizarro cartoon is sponsored by Baby Man.

This cartoon was inspired by the ugly building that is going up across the street from Bizarro International Headquarters here in Brooklyn. There used to be a charming, old, three-story red brick warehouse from the late 19th century, but the owner tore it down and is erecting a hideous condo building. If the architecture were at least interesting or tasteful I would not mind so much, but the monstrosity he is erecting will be twice as tall as the old building and utterly odious. A couple of floors are finished, and now that I can see the "style" of the building, I pray for the 50-foot woman to stomp it into dust. Or Godzilla, though he does not have a skirt up which I could look from my vantage point across the street. (Of course, a 50-foot woman probably has an 8-foot "schnootzer," and that might be even more frightening than Godzilla.)

I know the man who owns the land and he is a nice enough guy. But he's one of these people who hasn't an ounce of interest in asthetics. To him, "a building's a building." When a person doesn't even recognize the difference between an ugly building and a beautiful one when it is pointed out and explained, as I once did for him, you don't have much of a chance.

Of course, at this very moment, he may be writing on his blog that he knows a guy who doesn't recognize a huge profit margin even when it is pointed out and explained, and that my investment portfolio is odious.

The obvious difference is that I am not erecting a six-story reminder of my lack of financial skills across the street from his home.

Pursuit of Paradise

Bizarro is brought to you today by Parenting Made Simple.

Yes, it is a political cartoon I have posted here.
No, I do not feel like getting all political today.

Instead, let's talk about the weather. Here at Bizarro International Headquarters in New York City, it has been raining most of the time for weeks. The entire month of June was shot to hell by rain and colder-than-average temperatures. I feel like I'm trapped in Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. I really must move to the tropics somewhere. Problem is, they don't have a New York City anywhere down there.

I have tried wishing that the Dutch had built NYC somewhere in the Caribbean, but it doesn't change history and I'm still stuck in colder climes. In the end, it comes down to my deciding what is more important to me: culture or climate?

I lived and traveled in the south for several decades before I moved to NYC, so I have plenty of experience from which to make my decision. Even with the hot, sunny weather I crave, the general cultural and political attitudes of the southern U.S. do not suit me. In fact, at times they depress me as much as the weather in NY, especially now that I have known what it is like to live here, in a liberal, creative, open-minded, international community. And though I adore more exotic places like Central America and the Caribbean, they are too small and rural to quench my desire for the big city.

This makes it an easy decision. Culture is more important than weather, the way personality is more important than looks when choosing a spouse. Though both must be in the right ballpark, a great personality and average looks go much further in a relationship than a beautiful exterior wrapped around a sock puppet. If you can find both, as I have in CHNW, you are doubly blessed. (Just checking to see if she is reading my blogs. I'll let you know in a few days.)

There are two answers to my pathetic, meaningless, spoiled white-collar dilemma: become wealthy enough to have another home in a warmer place where I can spend the winters, find a way to embrace the weather in NYC and stop being a whiny brat.

I think we all know which of those choices is available to me.

FURTHER: I left the West Coast out of this mix because although I like San Francisco as much as NYC, it tends not to be any hotter or sunnier in most ways. I love the weather in L.A., but not the city. San Diego is too conservative, and that's pretty much all the big cities to choose from. Seattle and Vancouver seem cool, but the same weather problems. Such a whiner.